My name is Terrence Davis and I’m here on this blog to talk from the heart about what was and is inside my heart as a former gangleader turned Movie Director (South Carolina Drugwars). People ask me all the time what lured me into ganglife and usually right after I aanswer they ask me what lured me out.

My answer is the same thing, me just being curious. When gangs first started in South Carolina, they started in the capital city of Columbia. The population of Columbia is only 130,000 give or take. When gangs first came to Columbia it took about 8 years to really takeover and like the cancer it is, once it did it was devastating..

There began to be popularity in the media about gang life in movies and music like COLORS, Boyz n the hood, Death Row, Snoop Dogg, 2Pac, Ice Cube, and countless other examples. We knew of gangs but we only knew what they represented in the media so when sets like the Rollin 90 Crips, Gangster Disciples, and Treetop Pirus started to pop up it was met by resistance of the neighborhood cliques within the small city but the swag of the out of towners was exciting for the locals. Before you know it people started choosing sides and going to war. What I went through and many of my friends went through was hell. Their was nowhere to hide because everyone knew who you were and where you lived.

A murder in 2003 of a Gangster Killer Bloods from New York by a member of the Black Gangster Disciples from Chicago forever changed the state of South Carolina. The amount of press that the gang killing got had a tremendous effect on the black youth, me included. We saw that you can become famous for being a gangmember and for us thats all we wanted. We wanted to matter and mean something to our community. The problem was we went the wrong way to go about getting it.

Almost overnight gang affilation skyrocketed and people began choosing sides Red, Blue, or Black and sometimes both. The face that we all were living in a small city and state that no ones cares about we all felt like the underdogs, so nobody was safe.

In the beginning the gangs were not organized or into drug dealing. The only thing that they were fighting for was respect unlike their counterparts from bigger cities that were usually in gangs for power and money. Since guns and money weren’t major factors in the beginning of the gang epidemic the police continually dismissed South Carolina as having a gang problem. At the end of 2005, the Mexican cartels began to supply specific gangs (Gangster Killer Bloods and Black Gangster Disciples) with massive amounts of cocaine, marijuana, and automatic weapons. This new element that the Mexican cartel introduced to the city, combined with the arrival of drug addicted Hurricane Katrina victims from New Orleans; South Carolina had turned into nothing short of a warzone.

From 2006-2007 the gang murder rate tripled. As the violence increased so did the victims and the amount of press. Fed up by not having enough man power to fight the gangs with the support of the Mexican Cartel, local law enforcement reached out for government assistance and in 2007 the FBI stepped in. The same year a new law was passed into legislation entitled “The Gang Law”. Gang members became the priority of South Carolina law enforcement across the state. Almost immediately the amount of gang incidents decreased. The FBI was even successful with indicting members of the Mexican Cartel that were supplying the massive amounts of drugs to the gang members on the street level.

In 2010, an episode on History Channel’s Gangland featured the Gangster Killer Bloods because of their brutality and control over the drug trade. Currently, there are over 500 gangs throughout the state with a population of only 4 million that is more than the city of Los Angeles with a similar population.

With all of this being said I decided to tell my story, our story to the world in a new documentary set to release in 2014 called “COLORS: Bangin’ in South Caolina” a trailer for all you people that can’t wait http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RG9RVPrWzqA